One of the most cited grievances to come out of Occupy Wall Street is the crushing burden of student loans. I have had a couple of guest posts on the topic including one from Tim Smith who blogs on the Echo Boom. Here, now, is a piece by Alan Collings, who has been devoting himself to the issue.
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Some perspective is needed here. If there is an infectious disease outbreak, the CDC is pretty snappy about warning the public. Similarly for the USGS and earthquakes, NOAA and tsunamis, etc. Should we not expect the same type of response from the Education Department in the face of exponentially increasing student loan debt and astonishingly high default rates? When we were looking at a Trillion dollars in national student loan indebtedness, and the default rate was north of 1 in 4, why wasn’t the Department of Education sounding the alarm? These questions have yet to be posed to those in charge at the Department, but need to be. By Congress. Department staff who should have warned congress and the public but didn’t should be held accountable. This isn’t a question of good government. Rather it would seem that is a question about minimally adequate government.

So the question now is how to “fix what is broken”, to borrow a phrase from President Obama, Secretary Geithner, and others following the most recent State of the Union Address. Gainful employment rules, dickering around with the Pell Grant, and similar activities do nothing here. Neither do the various repayment programs that are being marketed by the higher ed crowd as viable substitutes for the consumer protections that were stripped from the system. Some policy “thought leaders”, in fact, are pointing to these untested, unproven programs as a basis for dramatically increasing the federal loan limits! This is not the direction we want to go. We cannot afford it, and to claim otherwise is hugely irresponsible.

Don’t be distracted by the sophisticated, confusing rhetoric being forced into this debate by those who would maintain the status quo no matter what the cost, or those who would end public support for higher education altogether. Neither extreme has the interests of the citizens at heart. Remember only that reall, this is not a difficult problem. Congress created it by removing fundamental, free-market consumer protections from student loans. Congress can and must fix it by essentially undoing what they did. Quite simply, it begins by returning, at a minimum, the bankruptcy protections that were removed without rational basis (when bankruptcy was the same for student loans as all other loans, far less than 1% of federal loans were discharged this way). With this fundamental, free market mechanism returned, the Department of Education will have a vested interest in compelling the schools to provide a high quality product at a low cost, and at reasonable debt levels.
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January 3, 2012, 5:36 pm
Nobody Likes to Talk About It, but It’s There
By ANDREW ROSENTHAL

DES MOINES — Talking about race in American politics is uncomfortable and awkward. But it has to be said: There has been a racist undertone to many of the Republican attacks leveled against President Obama for the last three years, and in this dawning presidential campaign.

You can detect this undertone in the level of disrespect for this president that would be unthinkable were he not an African-American. Some earlier examples include: Rep. Joe Wilson shouting “you lie” at one of Mr. Obama’s first appearances before Congress, and House Speaker John Boehner rejecting Mr. Obama’s request to speak to a joint session of Congress—the first such denial in the history of our republic.

More recently, Representative Jim Sensenbrenner, in a conversation overheard at Reagan National Airport in Washington, said of Michelle Obama: “She lectures us on eating right while she has a large posterior herself.” He offered a lame apology, but as Mary C. Curtis put it on the Washington Post’s new blog She the People: “Can you imagine how the incident would play out if an African American congressman made a crude remark about First Lady Laura Bush’s body? It certainly would have taken more than an insincere apology to wash that sin away.”

This ugly strain was crudely evident in the “birthers” and their ridiculous demands that Mr. Obama produce his birth certificate to prove that he was American, and not secretly an African Muslim.

Racist ‘plot’ vs. NY Jews

A racist, pistol-packing ex-con was gunning for the head of the Anti-Defamation League in New York when cops caught him in Arizona last week, police said.

They said Danny Lee Warner, nicknamed “Tombstone” and a leader of the Silent Aryan Warriors during his 10 years in prison in Utah, had been plotting against ADL national director Abraham Foxman.

The suspect told his wife he was “going to New York to kill some people,” one source said.

He sent her a letter while on the lam in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, saying he was “headed down South to kill some n---ers and Jews until the government gets me — hopefully, I’ll get enough to make it all worth it before I go.”